The "Game of Thrones" prequel brought in nearly 10 million viewers, making it HBO's biggest series premier ever
The shares of Warner Bros Discovery Inc (NASDAQ:WBD) are up 1.4% at $12.89 this morning on news that it's HBO Max service's "House of the Dragon" -- the prequel to "Game of Thrones" -- netted nearly 10 million viewers upon its release. This marks a record number of viewers for an HBO series premier. The company saw an outage during the Sunday night premier, with over 3,700 outages taking place just after the show started airing at 9 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector.
Despite this, Citigroup cut its price target on WBD to $21 from $29. The 12-month consensus price target now sits at $25.16, which is still a hefty 98% premium to last night's close. Analysts are still split, though, with nine calling the stock a "strong buy," and nine saying "hold" or worse.
Short sellers, meanwhile, are jumping ship. Short interest fell 4.4% in the last two reporting periods, and now the 59.65 million shares sold short make up a slim 2.7% of the stock's available float.
When we last looked at WBD, the stock was suffering a post-earnings plummet, though a familiar floor at the $13 level helped keep some of these losses in check. Since then, the equity has been traveling within a tight channel between the $13 and $14 levels, but yesterday dipped below here to log its lowest close since 2009 at $12.71. Year-to-date, Warner Bros Discovery has dropped 46%.